[Racing Formula 1 Pit Lane. Photo Credit: Pixabay]

Countless industries have taken sustainability initiatives, and Formula One (F1) does not seem to be the exception.

In 2019, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the association in charge of F1, released its sustainability initiative, detailing its carbon-zero goals by 2030.

Despite being a sport centered around cars that run on oils, the FIA is optimistic about achieving its goals, hoping to drastically reduce its contributions to climate change.

In the pursuit of carbon zero, identifying major emission causes has been the most important point of research.

While most would assume that the majority of emissions come from the cars themselves, according to the Tribune, the FIA attributes around 73 percent of all emissions to transportation, with another 7.3 percent being attributed to the emissions in operations during the events themselves.

To target the lesser cause of emission, the operations cost, F1 has taken on a couple different initiatives.

Firstly, they’ve experimented with different types of sustainable, green energies to power the events themselves.

For example, according to ArsTechnica, the Grand Prix at Bahrain was powered by solar energy, while the Dutch Grand Prix was powered by biofuels.

Secondly, they’ve worked on communicating their plans for sustainability to the local energy providers.

This has been crucial as the FIA does not oversee every single part of each Grand Prix, with a lot of the management being left at the hands of local industries.

While efforts to minimize emissions in the operations themselves have been quite successful, there has been much less progress in targeting the largest cause, the transportation.

According to the FIA, its main initiative surrounds the use of road transport, or specifically electrical road transport.

While this potential solution is less fossil fuel-heavy compared to air-based transport, the FIA admits that it does not result in zero carbon emissions.

This is largely due to the fact that the process of generating electricity is not always done in sustainable mediums, as oftentimes fossil fuels are burned for generators.

Thus, there is major room for improvement in the FIA’s initiatives, something they hope to resolve by 2030.

While the cars themselves only contribute around 0.7 percent to F1’s overall carbon emissions, there have been efforts to make the fuel itself more sustainable.

In 2022, the FIA announced its partnership with Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Group, in developing more sustainable and efficient fuels; it hopes that by 2026 all of its cars would be using said fuels.

This compounds on its attempts to introduce the concept of sustainability into the F1 fanbase with Formula-E, which uses entirely electric cars for racing.

Formula-E has been a massive success, with FIA Formula E stating that it had record high viewships of up to 344 million this year.

Overall, while the goal of a net-zero carbon footprint is a work in process, the targeted efforts made by the industry have resulted in substantial progress and exemplify the world’s shift to pursuing a much greener future.